Parents Push For Posterity

Tabb Alumni Want Tiger Tradition

January 26, 1991|By PATRICK LEE PLAISANCE Staff Writer

YORK — Melinda and Wayne Pollard are both proud Tabb High School Tiger alums, so proud that they moved back into the Tabb attendance zone in 1978 so their 6-year-old daughter, Megan, could follow in their footsteps someday.

But now Megan would be forced to attend rival York High School under a proposal made by a committee seeking ways to ease the disparity between the number of students at Tabb, York and Bruton high schools.

The Pollards and other Grafton area parents are angry about the proposal, which would shift about 400 children to York Intermediate and York High School beginning in September 1992.

Tabb High School has 1,306 students, York High School has 883 students and Bruton High School has 503 students. All three schools have a capacity of 1,300.

Grafton sits in the Tabb Intermediate and Tabb High School attendance zone. Many angry parents said they moved to the Grafton neighborhood so their children would graduate from Tabb, where strong school spirit is reflected in the orange Tabb Tiger paws painted on area roadways.

"It makes me sick," said Melinda Pollard. "It feels like you're being shipped out of your high school. I don't want my kids that far down the road."

Sharon Guin, a Brandon Way resident whose three young children also would be rerouted to York High School under the plan, agreed.

"It's very distressing to me," Guin said. "I moved here within the Tabb boundary for a reason - to let my children go to Tabb. Now they're telling me that doesn't matter."

While few parents interviewed had anything negative to say about York Intermediate or York High, all echoed an overwhelming allegiance to Tabb.

School Superintendent Judith Ball said she will make her recommendations, based on the committee's suggestions, to the School Board at 7:30 p.m. Monday at the board offices on Dare Road.

The proposal applies to all Grafton families in the 23962 ZIP Code but exempts families with young children who have siblings now attending Tabb Intermediate and Tabb High. Those children could follow their brothers and sisters through Tabb High School.

The affected neighborhoods would include Brandywine, Dare, Breezy Point, Piney Point, Lakeside Forest and all residents north of the Harwood's Mill Reservoir and the Poquoson River. It also includes all families along both sides of Oriana Boulevard.

Several Grafton parents who would be affected say shifting students is unnecessary because the Tabb High student population is expected to decline in two years after it reaches about 1,400.

"My kids are being penalized for something that will solve itself in two years," Guin said.

The proposal also raised other questions, such as whether a bus would be used to pick up one child whose sibling attended Tabb High while most other neighborhood children climbed on a bus to York High.

The idea also doesn't sit well with Deborah Long, who has looked forward to seeing her two small children graduate from Tabb. One is in the first grade at Grafton-Bethel Elementary and the other soon will start kindergarten.

"If I'd wanted my kids to go to Yorktown Intermediate, I would have moved to Edgehill," said Long, who added that she and her husband moved into the Tabb attendance zone soon after their first child was born.

"I'll go to work and pay tuition before we'll go up there."

She and other angry parents suggested that any changes should affect the parents of the Bethel Manor community, which is dominated by military families.

"If they're going to have to bus children, then go and bus them," said Deborah Pinckney, who moved in the area from Newport News so that her two small children could attend Tabb. "They're more transient and temporary, and it probably wouldn't affect them as much."

The committee rejected the idea of rerouting Bethel Manor children because it would add $42,000 in transportation costs. The committee also said concentrating Bethel Manor children in York Intermediate and York High School could create a "racial imbalance."